I See You
by Jasmine 'Jazz' Venn
Summary: Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy have become partners – in more than one way. Now they have a mystery to solve. Set of HG/DM drabbles. Complete.
1. Calm

A/N:

This pair of drabbles was written as a Christmas present for Isha (Gossipsoundsgood) as part of the HPFC Secret Santa event organised by the wonderful Sophie (Screaming Faeries).

Merry Christmas and happy reading everyone!

Jasmine

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><p>Three down, seven to go.<p>

Hermione closed the book and pushed it over the side of the desk. Instead of falling it floated towards the nearby portable bookshelf and landed neatly on top of _Modern Enchanted Seals, vol.2_. The witch sighed, scribbled something on a sheet of paper, and silently summoned her 1808 edition of _Entrapping Magicks_. She spent the next hour and a half alternating between reading the aged pages and frowning at the rapidly increasing number of notes rotating around her. Sometimes she would rearrange them with a flick of her wand but that never seemed to help. They were like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that didn't really fit together.

The case she was working on was getting out of hand. She had what was probably the most extensive private library on magical artefacts, she knew the best engineers and antique specialists in Europe, and despite all of the resources at her disposal her progress so far had been laughable.

Harry's team had brought her an intricate piece of clockwork machinery after one of their raids several months ago. It looked remarkably like a muggle pocket watch but was roughly the size of a coffee table. She had no idea what it was meant to do; all she knew was that it was clearly broken and that it reeked of magic even more strongly than Voldemort's horcruxes had. The evil thing just stayed there, ten feet or so from her desk, mocking her.

Hermione let her gaze wander past the mysterious device and towards the far end of the room, where Draco was working quietly. He had fashioned himself a working station much like the one from his old shop. Half a dozen floating marble surfaces of various size occupied his side of the lab. Most of them hosted tools, muggle and magical alike, all meticulously ordered in a way that seemed perfectly natural to Draco but was completely incomprehensible for Hermione. A long and narrow surface equipped with an adjustable magnifying glass on one end served as his working table.

Unlike Hermione, who could easily spend hours on end bend over her books, Draco preferred working on his feet. In the privacy of their lab he forsook his robes and wore dark trousers and a T-shirt instead – loose sleeves posed an unnecessary risk when examining delicate magical artefacts. His pale skin contrasted sharply with his clothes and almost blended with the marble giving him an eerie look from a distance. Hermione could barely make out the bandage around his left forearm but she knew that even after all these years he still kept the Mark covered.

Draco consulted a scroll of parchment, then a second one, and made his way to the device in the middle of the room. Hermione watched him gently trace the delicate engraving with his fingers until something clicked and he dislocated a small piece of the watch. He then carried it to his table and proceeded to inspect it under the magnifying glass. All of his movements were patient, reserved and orderly. Hermione thought that even if someone suddenly broke into the room and started yelling curses he would keep on working with the same calm.

'You're staring,' Draco said, his eyes not lifting from the piece of machinery.

'I like watching you work,' she confessed.

'It's a good thing I like working then,' he moved towards the parchment and started sketching the clockwork. 'There is a leak somewhere but I can't find it.'

'A leak?'

'Whatever the thing inside that pocket watch is, it's emitting quite a lot of magic. And it's doing so through a leak somewhere, otherwise the metal would be saturated. There's no way I can tell whether the leak is intentional or not until I find it though. How's your work going?'

'Not great,' Hermione said bleakly. 'I've gone through more books that I can count and I still can't figure it out. It just doesn't make any sense.'

She paused to look at her notes and then continued talking, this time more to herself than to Draco.

'At first I thought the pocket watch was a hiding spot but we can't shrink it and it's not exactly inconspicuous as it is. But if it's supposed to stay big, why design it as a pocket watch? And one can very easily mask and make use of the magic leak, but no one's bothered. That, and anything powerful enough to produce such a leak should have been reported missing already...'

'You're thinking aloud and it's distracting,' Draco said. Hermione hadn't noticed him move to her desk.

'I'm sorry. It's just that I can feel all of this magic right at my fingertips and I have no idea where it comes from and it's driving me crazy.'

He took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers one by one.

'Don't worry, love, we'll figure it out. We always do.'


	2. Idea

After the end of the war Draco decided that the best thing for him to do was to make use of the family resources and become a man of leisure. That high profile Ministry job could easily wait a few years. A generation, even, it wasn't like he actually needed to work for a living.

What he did need was a hobby and after a short period of introspection he thought he would try his hand at magical repair. It certainly sounded suitably boring and appropriate for the image of a quiet gentleman he was trying to adopt. It was also something he had a knack for, at least judging by his experience with the Vanishing Cabinet at Hogwarts.

While originally chosen half-heartedly, Draco's hobby soon became an obsession. He found fixing things and sometimes even building them from scratch deeply satisfying. Eventually, he bought the Knockturn Alley shop off Borgin in order to have access to a wider variety of magical items. He started making a name for himself and soon became a minor celebrity amongst magical engineers and private collectors alike. He was simply good at his job. He would, on occasion, go as far as to say that he was one of the best at what he did. But sitting across the room from Hermione Granger he was reminded that what he did wasn't particularly difficult to begin with.

Sure, he needed a steady hand, an observant eye and a considerable amount of background knowledge. But while the execution was often tricky, every single one of his projects followed a simple pattern: take the item apart, find the problem, fix it, and put the thing back together. All he needed to do was make sure nothing escaped him or got misplaced in the process.

Hermione, though... what she did really was something. While Draco created, she took pleasure in destroying; while he needed order, she thrived in chaos. There were no rules in what she did. Her official position in the Auror Office was Magical Artifact Specialist. In reality that meant she was something between a detective and an engineer; the sort of person who deals with the cases no one else wants to tackle. The Draco was currently sitting across her was precisely one of those cases.

He loved watching her work. In public she was polite but reserved, while in the privacy of her study he could read every single emotion on her face.

Above all, Draco adored watching Hermione read. When she was in a good mood, she would just sit very quietly, deaf to the world and a small smile on her lips. If she was looking for something specific in a book, she would play with the pen in her hand – she nearly always used pens instead of quills. If she was tired and couldn't make sense of the text, she would just stare at it with such intensity that a more delicate book might catch on fire. He could tell she's finding it difficult to concentrate then. But best of all, when she was completely engrossed in her reading she would mouth the words with the slightest of motions, her lips barely moving. It made him want to kiss her and he sometimes did.

But Hermione wasn't reading now. In fact, she had completely abandoned the mahogany desk and instead sat cross-legged on the floor, looking intently at the giant pocket watch.

For a while she just sat very still. Then she traced a delicate finger along the hummingbird engraving of the case of the watch. It was bothering her from the very beginning, long before she had sought out Draco's help. She could never figure out why, however.

Then Hermione felt something. Draco watched as the look on her face changed from bored to slightly amused to genuinely interested. Instead of haphazardly going over the metal, her hand hovered over the beak of the bird, and she closed her eyes and let her fingers explore the craftsmanship. And then, just as suddenly, she stopped.

Draco knew Hermione had seen something. Ten excruciatingly slow seconds passed during which she sat very, very still. He could almost hear the different bits of information slowly sliding into place in her mind. The whirlwind of notes around her desk stopped moving and she opened her eyes and smiled. It was a strange smile – wicked, proud, and happy all at the same time.

'I know what the pocket watch is supposed to do' she said.

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><p><span>AN:

Thank you for reading – I hope you've enjoyed it! Both drabbles were based on a longer Dramione story I outlined a while back. If you're interested in co-authoring this please drop me a line! Don't worry if you can't commit to a long collaboration or if you don't have much experience.

Cheers,

Jazz


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